The Friendly Skies begins with a 19th-century survey photograph of the Grand Canyon, capturing the sweeping grandeur of the Toroweap Overlook. Loose, sketchy brushwork reimagines the scene’s vastness, evoking both the romance of the West and the uneasy promise of manifest destiny. Synthetic color—phthalocyanine greens, lurid quinacridone magenta—bleeds into the Colorado River like a toxic spill, transforming the water into a radioactive glow. It’s gorgeous and unsettling, a protest wrapped in beauty.

A B2 stealth bomber hovers in the sky, clean and graphic, disrupting the canyon’s timelessness with military force. It’s a visual cipher: a cartoonish silhouette that mocks the promise of “friendly” skies. In the lower corner, an Anasazi petroglyph, blown up like a signal from space, reasserts Indigenous presence and memory—an undeniable reminder that this land was never empty.

Layered across the canvas are geometric forms—pyrite yellow, glaucous green, light brown drab—drawn from a 1933 Japanese color manual. These drifting shapes echo abstraction and targeting grids, refusing to fully resolve. Whatley’s composition seduces and resists at once. The Friendly Skies isn’t nostalgia—it’s a reckoning. It’s beauty with teeth, a painting that compels you to question not just what you see, but what it means to look.